Pit and Mortar
by CelticPhoenixProductions
Summary: Salvation is sometimes luck, salvation is sometimes earned, salvation is sometimes faith. But even with all three of these, salvation cannot wash away the scars. [Real World AU] "Souls Beyond Time - Part 6"


_~Forward~_

 _Installment six of 'Souls Beyond Time'! We've officially hit the half-way point, installment-wise. Chapter-wise or word-count wise, I have not a clue where this'll officially wind up._

 _This chapter is going to be a far different beast than any of the other previous installment of the series… Lots of jumping around, lots of borderline surrealism. Just brace yourself for some non-sequitur storytelling._

 _And all of this with my Beta being too busy to review it! So… Yeah! The freedom and anxiety that comes with no one telling me 'your idea here is stupid, change it'! Yay?_

 _So… yeah… This one MAY have some edits coming to it in the future for plausibility's sake, but I hope you all enjoy otherwise!_

O/o\O

Suggested Listening: "Unusually Quiet", _Halo Wars OST_

O/o\O

 _Pit and Mortar_

The first time she awoke, there was fire and pain.

Her breaths were stifled, choked, and it felt like her lungs were all but charred to a crisp.

After a distant popping, the world became black.

The second time she awoke, there was movement.

Her back was sliding, ground against gravel, against grit, against garbage.

The popping was louder, more rapid. A distant quake sent her back to the land of dreams.

The third time she awoke, there was talking.

Hushed whispers along bleached walls melding into a subtle beeping.

She was thankful, this time, for the mysterious fluff beneath her, as it let her drift back to sleep with no complaint.

The fourth time she awoke, there was choking.

Or drowning, to be more accurate. Shouting too, but by thrashing against clammy palms she effectively tuned it out.

There was a pinch to her side, and the shadows returned.

The fifth time she awoke, there was hope.

After moments of panic, of pain, moments of confusion and wakefulness, she was aware.

For the first time in days, Akemi Homura was conscious and alive. And she was determined to stay that way.

O/o\O

Two terrorists, half a kilometer out.

She lowered the sniper rifle's sight, wiping her brow with a free hand. It'd be a difficult shot, even if she got in closer. That also didn't account for the haze in her vision from the fever. She thought that after maybe a day or so it would have passed, but like the others this one seemed to keep itself present with little concern for her present situation.

Her present situation.

Her present situation.

Homura's brow twitched, forcing her to tighten her grip on the rifle. She ignored the pain in her chest, but the memories were harder to brush away.

O/o\O

Suggested Listening: "Jukai No Nakae", _Yuki Yuna is a Hero OST_

O/o\O

Homura knew that asking where she was, were she even _able_ to form coherent speech, would be a moot gesture. While she'd busied herself with reading the majority of the flight, she'd occasionally glance at the TV affixed in the back of the chair ahead of her, the display of which passively showed the plane's projected and current flight paths. When they'd gone down, they'd been somewhere in the Middle East, so from that fact alone she knew two things; communication beyond the rudimentary would almost certainly be impossible and even if she could ask someone her lack of geographical knowledge would impair any type of recognition.

When it came to where she was in the world, she was basically blind.

That said, she was surprised with how much she could deduce once she'd woken up. Albeit, her deduction was a slow process, but being bedridden (or mat-ridden, as the case may be) allotted her enough time to piece some things together.

The first thing she came to recognize was that she wasn't in a hospital, but in a home. She, along with half a dozen others, were placed side-by-side along the length of a room with chalky-white walls made out of some kind of stone or hardened clay. The floor was dirt, though nicely kept. Air in the room was dry, rather stale, and particularly unpleasant during midday, with the measly two small windows doing little to ventilate in the cramped conditions.

What tipped her off as to the building being a home came with her first encounter with the person she assumed owned the building. He was an elderly man, or seemingly so, with deep bronzed skin that wrinkled and hung from his bones like pendulums. His chin jutted forward and was coated in a finely-kept graying beard, the peppered, curly hair continuing up his jaw line and running along his balding head. He walked with a hunch, and though his presence seemed rather terrifying, what with the way he energetically burst through the door carrying a tray of tea, his eyes quickly dispelled any tension she felt around him.

He'd passed out the tea to each member of the room that was conscious, even going so far as to carefully give water to those that were still unconscious. It was this consideration that had him finding her awake, pleasant surprise written over his face. He was immediately at her side, and any remaining unease was cast aside when he naturally and calmly lifted her head with one of his hands and let her sip her own cup of water, which was nirvana on her throat.

As she had figured, the man didn't speak Japanese; instead deep, soothing Arabic words drifted from his mouth. His aura was relaxing, his kindness unforgettable, and his smile was so genuine she knew of only one other person who had ever served to rival it.

It had been that thought that shocked her wakefulness into full-blown anxiety, as she suddenly realized she'd been switched out of her clothing and into something that made treating her, admittedly numerous, injuries easier. This included the ribbon which had been lovingly braided into her hair before she left. To her relief though, her panicked patting of her head spurred the man to take her hand and guide it to a small table, one of many in the room, where the red strands were resting undisturbed.

She gripped the parcels and drew them close, feeling the cuts, bruises and broke ribs along her back twinge painfully with the movement. The shift also alerted her to the fact that her left leg wasn't able to move and that the pinky on her right hand was completely encased in some kind of primitive splint. Still, she struggled against the pain and held the ribbons close to her chest. The man had backed off, giving the girl space and letting her caress the strands in peace. It was all she could do for several days as her injuries slowly stitched themselves together. By the end of the second week she knew every knick and bump in the ribbons' shape, understood where every fiber started and ended.

In the intervening time plenty had happened. The first thing was her deduction of the man and their current living situation. He'd setup a makeshift hospital of some sort in his home, complete with two rudimentary heart monitors, one of which had been assigned to Homura herself. The other… well… got passed around a lot. None of the unconscious 'survivors' lasted more than the first week of Homura's consciousness. All but one of the conscious survivors followed suit the second week. The old man wheeled the bodies out himself, and where they went after that, she didn't know.

The one survivor that was still with her turned out to be German, which meant that she was just as in the dark trying to speak with him as she was the old man… if she could speak at all. It seemed that in her unconscious state she'd had a rather bad… fit of some sort. It had happened occasionally because of her heart condition, but her lungs would fill with liquid and it would be a race for the doctors to clear her airways before she drowned. It seems like the old man had saved her from one of those attacks, but maybe not as delicately as a trained doctor; any time she tried to speak, all that managed to escape was a pained rasp.

The last thing of note, to Homura at least, were the visits from other people. All of them spoke Arabic, but tone of voice was borderless; these people were all professional and they were _very_ angry about something. She never saw them, but the old man had answered the door a number of times, with the people taking longer and longer to go away each time.

Eventually she'd gotten the implication that the people at the door weren't friends or neighbors, but searchers of some kind, and, with the way the old man hid the survivors, she got the feeling that they weren't exactly friendly towards her. It would also explain why the old man had kindly, but firmly, prevented either her or the German from leaving the room once they'd recovered enough to walk.

Soon though the days began to blur together and she quickly lost track of how much time she'd actually spent in the man's house. Thoughts of home became muddled memories, blurred as the days she'd come to live through.

Every day she prayed to whatever would listen to her that soon enough someone would find the old man, would find her and the German businessman, that they would be taken home to be with family and friends… to get back to Madoka. She even mused that she would learn Arabic, if only so she could personally thank the man who had probably saved her life after the plane crash.

Then came the day those hopes were dashed, along with most of the innocence that had resided within her.

It had started out like any other; peaceful, quiet. The man had passed out tea to her and the German while the two enjoyed a bout of chess. The old man had provided the board and pieces and the game didn't require anything more than simple rule knowledge in order to play, so the three had found it as a suitable replacement for deep conversation.

Then came the knock on the front door, hard and loud.

The old man had drawn away, closing up their room behind him as he went to answer the call. A beat had passed, the distant cricking of the wooden slab being shifted aside.

Normally, there would have been talking. Instead there was a single 'BANG' and a myriad of celebratory cries.

Homura flinched at the sound, reflexively curling up and pushing herself into the nearest corner, trying to make herself the smallest person she could be. Everything after that was a terrifying blur.

Men with guns had burst into the room. The German had yelled, had fought back, had punched and kicked and bit at the men, and by the end of it all three had wound up in a bloody heap in the other corner of the room, each with at least a single bullet wound to their name.

When she finally came back to reality Homura found herself alone with a pile of corpses… Holding an empty pistol in a shaking hand.

She froze, unsure how to process the information her brain was telling her. Had she shot someone? She didn't know. She didn't want to think that she had. But fear and adrenaline had their ways of making people act against their own moral compass and the more she tried to recall how the pistol wound up in her hands, the more she realized that she'd pulled the trigger over and over and over again.

Homura had shot someone. Homura had _killed_ someone.

She dropped the gun but then otherwise locked stiff, terrified that if she moved someone would have seen her and shot her. After what felt like hours of stillness she started inching towards the door, limping lightly on her still healing knee.

She found the old man in his living room, still conscious, with a bullet in his side. He looked at her, eyes glassy and pained, but even then he managed to put a smile on his face for her; strong until the very end. She crawled to him, tears of fear and despair dripping from her eyes. The man reached out for her, cupping one of her small hands in his own large callused palms. He squeezed, blinking as he did so, the smile never fading.

Homrua hicked and squeezed back, leaning her cheek down to his chest, her eyes still looking up at his face as the blood drained from his skin.

He smiled even after his heart finally stopped beating.

The school girl stumbled to her feet in a daze, fingers pulling at the ribbons in her hair absently. The man's warmth lingered on her skin, but the air around her began to chill rapidly to compensate. He had been a buffer, a savior of sorts, protecting her from a violent, unpredictable world, a world that had quite literally kicked in the door and taken the only light around her from her.

So she ran. She grabbed what she could carry and ran.

It was twenty minutes before she realized she had no idea where she was running. Streets of houses made of stone and mud, a maze of a town built into the shadow of a mountainous cliff and its overhang.

She was lost, with no home, with no help, with no way to contact the outside world and without anyone to trust.

No, that had been wrong, she thought. She could always trust herself. She wasn't always the most reliable person, but she knew what her limits were and how she could push them.

And the world might have taken most of the light away from her world, but there was still a shimmering star in the distance, a star that made the gorgeous night sky pale in comparison.

She stopped her running and rested a hand on the wall of one of the houses, catching her breath.

"Mad…" Homura hacked, a thin trail of yellow liquid dripping from her lips. "Ma-Madok… Madoka… Madoka… Madoka…" she doubled over but did not collapse, palms resting on her knees. She wiped her chin and stood, each proclamation of her chant granting her one more ounce of strength, "Madoka! Madoka! Madoka!" Her voice raised in pitch and volume, eventually becoming strained shouts that rubbed her fatigued throat raw and reverberated into the desert around her.

That's right. The world had yet to take the brightest star away from her, and she was going to follow that star all the way home. No longer would she sit in hope of rescue; now Akemi Homura would make her own way in the world. She had survived the crash and come out alive, and she doubled down on her intent to stay that way.

O/o\O

Suggested Listening: "Umbra Nigra" _Puella Magi Madoka Magica OST_

O/o\O

Homura slipped back behind the crate, narrowly dodging the patrol that passed by moments later. She swallowed a satisfied breath and pocket the key in her left hand, ghost of a smile worming way onto her lips.

Months upon months of struggling, of fighting, of warding away her body's defective nature… Soon she would be ready to leave this hell hole and get back to the only place she wanted to be.

But, as she snuck her way back out of the camp, a lingering question weighed down her grin; had it been months or had it been years?

O/o\O

Suggested Listening: "Salve, terra magicae", _Puella Magi Madoka Magica OST_

O/o\O

Leaving the area was a non-option.

After a day of hiding among back alleys she'd come to terms with her own disorientation and decided the most logical solution would be to find out where the hell she was. So, she did the most logical thing in order to fulfill that goal; she'd climbed to the top of the village's cliff. It was difficult, and took her far longer than she was willing to admit, but she'd gotten where she needed to be in order to see the several kilometers encircling the crag of rock.

From what she'd managed to observe, her plane had gone down near the center of a valley, cut off from the world by mountains and cliffs going every direction. There was fighting nearly every day at the passes leading out of the range, skirmishes between who Homura could only assume were insurgents and government officials. The people of the valley, a congregation of about seven or eight villages total, were enslaved to the insurgents it seemed, with the terrorists cutting off practical access to the world and forcing the residents to go to them for supplies.

Supplies, Homura had quickly realized, that she had none of.

So she started stealing.

Small things at first, absolute necessities; water, food, clothing.

She spent her first nights huddled in a dust pit, covered by a stolen wicker basket and tarped by a thick wool blanket. In a cruel twist she'd been thankful for the lack of rain, as she most likely would have died from simple hypothermia long before she had time to do much of anything resembling making it home.

As such, her already present heart condition was her only major health issue that she needed to keep on top of. When they'd released her from the hospital it had been explained to her that the condition was no longer anywhere near as severe as it had been when she was young, though medicine and a stringent list of guidelines had been prescribed as precautionary measures, measures that had come in handy during rare but oh-so-terrifying attacks.

The worst it had gotten was the occasional fever that left her unable to do anything for a day or two at a time, though the phantom pains of that drowning episode from when she was partially unconscious still crept up from time to time.

Nothing, though, beat the heart attack she had when she'd returned one night to her basket only to find a pair of snakes settling a nest beneath it. After that little episode, she decided that more stable shelter was necessary.

Over the weeks she managed to find a relatively well-hidden crag in the cliff, and once she'd stolen some lumber she managed to make a pretty good cave for herself to sleep in each night that was also easy to keep rodents and vipers out of. Again though, she didn't exactly want to admit how many tries it took in order for her to get the door to hinge properly; the stories she'd read while in the hospital could only teach her so much about surviving in a hostile world and her limbs were still struggling to recover from the atrophy they'd suffered over being bedridden for months at a time.

For a time, life was purely about making it to the next day, often beginning one day sore, tired and caked in dried blood only to end it exhausted, bruised and nursing burns and scabs accrued while piecing together some facet of her new (temporary) life.

It was only after one of the terrorists found her shelter that her necessities finally stepped over morally comfortable boundaries.

He hadn't seen her, only her living space. He hadn't radioed in for backup, but rather stepped in to examine on his own. She could have left the shelter behind and fled…

But she didn't.

For the first time, Homura made the conscious choice to kill someone. And it hadn't been pretty.

She only had a small work knife that'd she'd stolen in order to make food preparations all that much easier; she'd even started practicing with it in order to catch small game like rats and, to her disgust, scorpions.

Her first stab didn't kill him. The man was young, but untrained, and instead of going for his guns he clawed at her, trying to pull her away. She hung from his neck, holding on to the knife wedged under his Adam's apple for dear life; he gurgled the entire time, thrashing about like a cornered coyote.

The second stab did the trick, and the man floundered into a sad sack of meat and bone.

She had vomited afterward, and the follow up work had been far from pleasant; hours stuck in the shelter with a corpse waiting for night to fall, stripping the man of everything she could use (even his weapons) before dragging the corpse to the middle of the valley and leaving him in the heated desert sands, coming back and cleaning up both her puke and the blood.

It was only after she was done scrubbing the rock with a soiled rag that she realized her cardigan, one of the few scraps of clothing she still had from before the crash, had been stained with the man's gore.

After that she decided that it was becoming too dangerous to simply lay low and she needed to redouble her efforts to leave. But that required a plan beyond 'live another day'.

Homura began to plot.

O/o\O

Suggested Listening: "Anima Mala", _Puella Magi Madoka Magica OST_

O/o\O

"Madoka…"

The raven girl's eyes fluttered open, pupils pining for the fields of pink that had graced them only moments earlier.

She shifted where she lay, rubbing her lids. The dreams were getting less vivid, and it was beginning to scare her. She had dreams of all of them; Mami, Sayaka, Hitomi… though mostly of Madoka.

Their faces, all of their faces, were slowly drifting away from her, blurring and malshapping as the days grew longer.

"Soon…" she whispered, curling in on herself and struggling not to cry, "Soon I can see you all again… I can see you again Madoka…"

O/o\O

She'd taken plenty of lives since she'd first killed.

To escape the valley, she would need weapons, she would need transport, she would need protection.

Much like she always had, she acted only at night, only now it was far more than scavenging to survive; now it was a hunt to accrue tools of liberation.

She'd spend days resting or watching from atop the cliff, marking movements and storehouses. At night, she would sneak out and steal what she needed; guns, grenades, body armor. Occasionally she wasn't silent enough and needed to kill a guard or two in order to slip by. The death toll began to rise and the insurgents started to get restless.

Sometimes she observed the soldiers practicing with their guns, learning every intricacy of each weapon she could through the cracked lens of a worn pair of binoculars she'd pilfered what felt like ages ago. She even found a dune in the desert that did a decent job blocking sound and muzzle flashes, allowing her to practice with the weapons herself with a reduced sense of paranoia.

Then came a night at what she called village three where she accidentally tripped an alarm and engaged in a firefight with the insurgents living there. She'd only survived by the skin of her teeth, but by the end of the night she'd killed seven men and only taken a bullet to the thigh.

Luckily, the villagers seemed somewhat relieved to be free of their oppressors (and some dismayed at the deaths of what were likely friends). A man who had seen the fight had seen her weakened condition and had taken her in for the night. Even without being able to speak their language, the man tended to her wounds and fed her, and even hid her the next morning when other insurgents had come looking for the killer of their men.

She had also met the man's daughters, two bubbly girls, one who was barely out of her toddler phase and one who was slightly older. The older of the two took a liking to Homura, calling her 'fatat alssihria', or something that Homura couldn't even begin to pronounce. The small child reminded Homura of the pinkette back home, what with the way she clung to the Japanese girl and spoke to her with excitable chatter.

After that, things began to change. Even without being able to communicate with them, Homura began forming a bond with the people in the villages. Rumor and word of 'fata alssihria' drifted on the winds, and whenever she found herself in dire straits while raiding an insurgent depot, restless villagers would come to her aid, sometimes hiding her from threats, sometimes combating the threats themselves.

Unintentionally, Homura had become a beacon of hope for these people; a responsibility she had not asked for nor one she was prepared to be saddled with, but one that did prove itself fruitful. Without their help her plan to escape may never have had a chance of getting off the ground.

O/o\O

Suggested Listening: "Agmen Clientum" _Puella Magi Madoka Magica OST_

O/o\O

The humvee skidded over the rocks, dirt, debris and fire kicking up in their wake.

"Hold it steady!" Homura screamed. She doubt the man could understand her, and he probably already knew he needed to keep his driving smooth. But, in a situation like this, yelling was cathartic in a way.

She pulled the trigger, trying to keep the rifle level at the three jeeps tailing them, popping off shots that aimed for the drivers in specific. Attempting to shoot the wheels had been fruitless, so she settled for hoping their pursuer's windshields weren't bulletproof.

With no small amount of satisfaction, the car that she'd been firing at swerved to the side, toppling off the cliff to the left of the caravan, just as the cliff itself came to an abrupt end in a rock wall. A flash, some smoke and a metal-wrenching crunch told her all she needed to know about what had happened to the car.

Add a few more notches to the casualty list.

O/o\O

Suggested Listening: "Where is the Truth" _Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Rebellion OST_

O/o\O

The man from village three had managed to track her down. After months of not even visiting the village, she'd been surprised. Even more surprising was the condition the man looked to be in. He was far more gaunt than she remembered, pale and emaciated; he looked like walking death.

How he had founder, she didn't know, but he had immediately prostrated himself to her, continually waving a worn photograph of his two daughters and openly weeping like a child.

She allowed him in and they 'talked', using crude drawings and images to try and convey what meaning they could. Homura had managed to pick up on some of the language, a couple basics, but nowhere near enough to convey what needed to be said.

The man, from what she understood, wanted to leave the valley, wanted to escape the insurgents, but most importantly he wanted a better life for his daughters. He wanted Homura to take the three of them out of the grasp of this hellhole.

She would have never considered it if it hadn't been for the fact that she was almost ready to leave herself, but was starting to come up against some logistics issues when it came to any kind of pursuit force. Terrorists were constantly refreshing their forces at the border to the valley from some kind of outside training camp, and while things had begun to quiet down inside the valley itself there were bad omens on the horizon of that changing very quickly.

So Homura agreed. She had plans to leave within the week, and the man, through scrawl and art, said they would be ready.

She hoped they would.

O/o\O

Suggested Listening: "Ifuu Doudou", _Yuki Yuna is a Hero OST_

O/o\O

Homura chucked the rifle out the door, having expended all the ammunition they had for it.

She reached back to the back seat, "Boom boom!"

The two girls, who had been keeping their heads down, dutifully reached for one of the four RPGs loaded in the back of the humvee and passed it forward. The three of them had worked out a crude command system before leaving so as to keep Homura armed during their escape.

An escape that was getting rockier by the second.

She'd managed to take out two cars so far, but a fourth car had come in, all of which were pocking their armored car with small arms fire.

Homura leaned back out the window and targeted the lead jeep. She pulled the trigger and the red-tipped grenade zipped forward, plowing into the ground below the car and causing it to hop but failing to stop it completely.

Homura winced, ticking her tongue and tossing the expended launcher into the wastes.

"Boom boom!" she called again. Another RPG was passed up to her, which she immediately began to aim back at the approaching cars.

Her heart was beating faster than ever, the world was beginning to blur, her hands were shaking more and more… and all she could think about was how _close_ she was to escaping her miserable life in the Middle East and making it home to Madoka.

She pulled the trigger and the RPG sailed true, striking right between the two cars and blowing off both their carriages.

Only, before that a similar streak had left the rear car, heading right for the humvee.

Homura's eyes widened, throwing her body into the car fast as she could.

"Get dow-!"

The back of the car exploded.

O/o\O

Suggested Listening: "Aoi Toki", _ROD The TV OST_

O/o\O

She had found the plane's wreckage a few weeks after she'd housed herself in the cave.

It was embedded pretty firmly in a mountainside, and relatively unguarded.

There had been very little there to recover, which met her expectations but certainly didn't match her hopes.

Her travel bag had been shredded, and for the most part there was nothing in there to recover beyond a few scraps of clothing.

There was something, though, something that had sat in her cave since she found it.

A photograph, of herself, of Madoka, of Sayaka, Mami, and Hitomi, all at the beach during the summer, having the time of their lives on the hot sands and cooling surf…

The frame was broken, but the picture was still mostly intact. Every night she would go to sleep imagining the sand outside was a beach away from the world she loved so much.

O/o\O

Homura was alive. She had made it. There was no more pursuit, no more terrorists, no more anything. Just desert for miles going East and an overturned humvee filled with guns.

The man's had had been caved in on the steering wheel; she'd woken up next to it. Had it not been for her hardening over the whole ordeal, she would have probably had more of a reaction.

The youngest daughter had been relatively lucky when it came to her death; a twisted neck, as far as Homura could tell. It seemed to have been brief and painless.

The older daughter, though…

Homura had found her outside the humvee, crushed from the waist down, still breathing.

There had been a brief glimmer of hope that the child could be saved, but it died when it became apparent neither of them had the strength to lift a several-ton vehicle… one that had probably caused too much damage for the young girl's body to take.

The girl had smiled.

That's what stuck with Homura the most. The child had smiled at her and motioned to the pistol strapped to her hip. Like a fool, Homura had brought it out… and the girl finished the motion by bringing it to her own head and closing her eyes in resignation.

The Japanese girl froze.

Death, murder… all justified in the name of survival and morality… In the name of justice and order… Every kill had been working towards freedom and against the people who had tried to kill her.

But this…

Her heart _hurt_.

The child squeezed her eyes and the smile became more of a grimace as she tugged on the barrel, pressing it further into her forehead.

Homura hiccupped, her hands shaking as tears drifted from her eyes.

She scowled, closed her own eyes, and screamed.

Her voice completely overtook the sound of gunfire.

O/o\O

After hours in a disheartened daze, she'd gathered what she could and began following the road east.

Her chest hurt, her fingers shook, and her eyes were fresh out of tears.

But Homura was alive.

And she was determined to stay that way.

O/o\O

 _~Afterwards~_

 _So yes! Homura is alive and… uh… alive! Moemura, on the other hand… well, much like the original series, that precious flower was not long for our world. She's gone, and in her place is the badass we all know in love, now with 100% more uncurable heart condition!_

 _This one… honestly feels like the messiest one so far. And while it's supposed to be, I also kinda feel off because of it. There's a lot here I wanted to leave vague for the sake of being concise, and a lot of it because having too many unique elements would begin stripping away what made this series a real-life reflection to the original series. Putting Homura into this crazy terrorist situation was the best equivalent I could devise to putting her through the hell of the series without the use of magic and without killing her._

 _Hopefully, I made her survival and eventual escape realistic enough that it's at least plausible; I know there were a couple voices back in Tinder who were wondering if she'd really been offed, and how implausible it would be for her to have survived, so I'm worried how this might be received. So, I'm stating this now; this part of the story has been planned since the beginning. I just want to be clear on that point so people don't think I did this in order to pander or something like that._

 _That all said, even with my grievances about how some things ended up coming out, I feel at least mostly confident that the right emotional tone was reached. A sort of low-key madness, kinda like a fever dream. Maybe the scattershot quality adds to that, maybe not. I just can't wait to hear people's comments on this, so PLEASE leave a review! I thrive off them!_

 _And, if you ever feel like wanting a fic of your own with my personal touch, I do commissions! And please, don't forget to subscribe!_

 _That's all for now! Catch ya on the flipside!_


End file.
